December

Over the past twelve months I’ve been playing a song every day and posting it to this blog. I’ve tried to include most musical styles, playing everything from the children’s TV theme tunes to operatic arias and a healthy selection of 1980s pop classics, totalling over 24 hours of music. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing something on the piano most days, but at times it has been challenging, especially since I’ve been travelling a lot in 2015 and a 10-day trip meant recording 11 or 12 tunes while I should have been packing! I’ll not be repeating the challenge in 2016, not least because combined with my 2010 piano tunes, I’ve now recorded over 730 songs in total, and I think that’s enough for now!

When I started wondering about which song to finish this year with, there was only really one option: Billy Joel’s 1977 masterpiece Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. This is a song which I’ve loved for many, many years. I’ve seen Billy perform it three times in Glasgow, once in Birmingham and once in the Hammersmith Apollo. I imagine that a highlight of 2016 will be Scenes at the Wembley concert in September.

Music critic Scott Floman gave a very apt description of Scenes in Goldmine magazine: it’s an “epic multi-sectioned masterpiece which starts as a slow smoky ballad, builds up to a jaunty piano rocker with a New Orleans flavor that also shows off Joel’s knack for telling stories and creating rhymes, before finally returning to smoky ballad territory again.” And where exactly is the eponymous Italian Restaurant? It is apparently Fontana di Trevi, just across from Carnegie Hall where Billy Joel ate during a series of 1977 concerts. Indeed, the line “A bottle of white, a bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of rosé instead?” was actually spoken to Billy by a waiter at Fontana di Trevi! Oh to see that napkin…

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant isn’t really the kind of piece you can just play on the piano, so I’ve done a full arrangement including bass, guitar, accordion, strings, horns and percussion. I’ve used a brilliantly programmed drum track from a midi file online – I’ve tried to identify who arranged this track but haven’t been able to. However everything else is me, including the dodgy keyboard sax – sorry Joe Moretti!

I hope you enjoy this piece, and I hope you’ve enjoyed my 365songs this year. Happy 2016 to everyone who has listened!

For my penultimate song of the year I’m returning once more to ABBA and the wonderful Intermezzo No. 1. This instrumental performed by Benny Andersson was included on the self-tilted ABBA album in 1975, and was one of only two instrumentals in the entire ABBA catalogue, the other one being Arrival. In his book about the stories behind the songs, musicologist Christopher Patrick Tesch describes the “whimsical and melodramatic” Intermezzo No. 1 as “a sophisticated pastiche of all that is great and wondrous in the world of classical music, injected with a shot of late twentieth century pop enthusiasm”. Kudos also to “Tom” from Tom’s ABBA Midi files for the very well programmed drum track I’ve used on this recording!

Today’s song is another classic in my final week of 365Songs for this year: Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. First released on their 1978 album Jazz, Don’t Stop Me Now has gone on to become one of the best known Queen songs, and one of my favourites! If it’s your first time on the site, find out more about the 365 Songs project or see all of my December songs here.

Today’s song is Let It Go from the 2013 Disney film Frozen. Written by husband-and-wife song-writers Kirsten Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, Let It Go won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Original Song and the Grammy for Best Song Written For Visual Media. It has become one of the best-selling singles of all time, and Disney eventually released Let It Go: The Complete Set featuring the 42 different language versions of the song from the international versions of the soundtrack. I hope you enjoy my version.

Today’s song is a special one, and is probably one of the main reasons I decided to do my 365songs challenge again this year as I didn’t discover the stunningly beautiful Vilar Glad i Din Famn until 2011 when it was released on Benny Andersson’s O Klang Och Jubeltid album.

Vilar Glad i Din Famn (“Resting happily in your arms”) is a love song with lyrics by Swedish poet and dramatist Kristina Lugn and music by ABBA’s Benny Andersson which was performed at the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling. Here’s the video of this performance:

On the O Klang Och Jubeltid album, Vilar Glad i Din Famn is sung by Helen Sjöholm. This haunting version can be heard here.

Since this song became one of my favourite ever works by Benny Andersson I decided to write a set of lyrics in English to the melody based on the Christmas story and we used this at church on Christmas Eve in 2013 and 2014. We filmed this for posterity:

It’s Christmas Eve! Today’s festive tune is Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride, with a bit of a latino twist! It was written as an instrumental in 1946 and lyrics were added later in 1950 by Mitchell Parrish whose other famous lyrics include Stars Fell On Alabama, Stardust and the English version of Volare!

Today’s song is a ballad written by Depeche Mode’s Vince Clarke, but wasn’t released until his post-Depeche Mode days when he formed the band Yazoo with Alison Moyet. Only You then became their first single. Its association with Christmas came in 1983 when The Flying Pickets released an a cappella version which promptly became the Christmas No. 1 in the UK that year. Only You has since been covered in Spanish by Enrique Iglesias, and this year Kylie Minogue’s Christmas album features it as a duet with none other than James Corden.

Today’s Christmascious song is by the English composer Michael Head. The first time I heard The Little Road To Bethlehem was when Hayley Westenra included it on her Christmas album and I’ve loved it ever since! I particularly like the slightly irregular time signature which keeps you on your toes!